The Ocaitchi Legacy

I recently finished chapter 1 in SWTOR with my smuggler character. One of the games features at this point is the unlocking of the Legacy system. There isn’t much to it right now, aside from earning xp towards legacy levels (that don’t mean anything yet) and the ability to have a last name that is shared among all your characters on that server. I’m interested to see what Bioware does with this system.

One thing it did inspire was a thought about my characters name.  For at least 16 years Maarkean has been my online persona. The name originated as an elf ranger D&D character I created for a game with my future brother-in-law. I’m not sure if we ever actually played. But the name of the character stuck with me.

These were the early days of the internet in general society and I started to use Maarkean as my name in chatrooms, forums, etc. When SWG arrived in 2003, my main character was Maarkean and that’s where I picked up the last name of Ocaitchi.  A few years later, when I started working on the story that would one day evolve into Aristeia, I used the names of characters from my SWG guild, including my own.  Over the years, many names changed to be more appropriate to my universe, or just generally more appropriate for public consumption.

But not Maarkean. I had a connection to that name so I left it alone. I’ve continued using Maarkean on the internet and it is how I am known on a number of websites. So without really thinking about it, that was what I named my first character in SWTOR.

Now that my book is out, I’ve started to feel a little weird about it. Maarkean is one of my books main characters. He has a personality and an existence that is now available to the world, instead of just a word document on my computer. And he’s not me. Sure, like all writers, there are elements of me in my writing and characters, Maarkean probably more than most. But it feels a little weird playing as Maarkean now.

It’s to late to do anything about the websites I am already on and for this character in SWTOR. But I think this might need to be the swan song of my existence as Maarkean on the internet.